Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

What does piety have to do with public health? In several recent rulings concerning restrictions on in-person religious services during the pandemic, the Supreme Court has repeatedly confronted the question, but it is hardly a new one. Humans have probably been asking similar questions for as long as they have clustered together in sufficient densities to sustain the spread of pandemic pathogens: which is to say, for as long as they have been recording their history. Pandemics and piety are sometimes opposed protagonists in well-known artifacts of that history. Homer’s Iliad opens with the god Apollo, angered by the Greek king Agamemnon’s mistreatment of his priest, driving “the foul pestilence along the host, and the people perished.” Until the prophets were consulted and the god appeased, “the corpse fires burned everywhere.” And in the Hebrew Bible it is not only the Egyptians who are punished by plagues. When the Israelites “lost patience” in Numbers 21 and “spoke against God and against Moses,” “God sent fiery serpents among the people; their bite brought death to many in Israel.” Only when the sinners confessed their errors did God teach Moses the cure. We cannot call either of these two examples from roughly three millennia ago “historical,” since we cannot be sure that either of these events actually occurred. But they certainly teach us something about the long history of human reaction to pandemic. In both we see theodicy at work: that is, an attempt to understand and to justify an epidemiological catastrophe in terms of the intentional action of gods or God — in these instances punitively, a plague as punishment for some error or sin in the people or the polity. As King Edward III of England put it in 1348, when the pandemic known as the bubonic plague or Black Death was devastating Asia, Europe, and North Africa: “Terrible is God towards the sons of men, and… those whom he loves he censures and chastises; that is, he punishes their shameful deeds in various ways during this mortal life so that they might not be condemned eternally.” It was in order to do penance for those sins and appease the punishing deity that the king called for collective prayer in churches across his realms. Older than the hills, but fresher than the grass. In March 2020, the month that the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 a pandemic, the share of internet searches for prayer surged across the globe, among adherents of every faith, to the highest level ever recorded in the (short) history of Google Trends. And in early May last year, with much of the United States in “lockdown,” Kraig Beyerlein, Kathryn Lofton, Geneviève Zubrzycki, and I administered a survey on COVID and religion in collaboration with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs that found plenty of evidence for contemporary covid-19 theodicy. When asked about the coronavirus, sixty-three percent of Americans agreed that through it “God is telling humanity to change the way we are living.” And fifty-five percent thought that God would protect them from infection. Both these views are characteristic of classical theodicy, though there are also important differences between them. For example, white evangelical Christians proved much more likely (sixty-seven percent) to think that God will protect them from infection, whereas black (seventy-eight percent) and Hispanic (sixty-five percent) Americans are much more likely to think God is demanding change. Perhaps we should speak of at least two pandemic theodicies in contemporary America, one more satisfied with the moral and social status quo, the other more critical. In short, arguments about the relationship between piety, politics, and pandemics have a long and potentially instructive history. We find ourselves in need of that instruction, now that covid-19 has put similar arguments at the center of strident debate. In the United States, the pandemic has brought to the surface of public discourse a sharp divide between those who advocated public health measures to slow the spread of the disease, such as prohibitions on gatherings of large numbers of people in places of worship, and others who argue that such measures unconstitutionally restrict the exercise of religion. The divide may be more political than popular. In early May